Chains Around the Grass (25 page)

The week before the meeting, Jesse couldn’t sleep. Each time his eyes would close, he would hear that sound again, that garbled, muffled threat that refused to become words. It dashed violently against the back of his forehead, making his eyes water and his throat contract in anguish. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. At first, he’d thought it was a real noise—a radio someone had left on, or voices from the street. But when he’d get up to investigate, there was never anything there. Little green men from outer space, he’d laugh it off. A bit annoying, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

But now, it was worse. Much worse. He’d get up and pace the dark hall, his heartbeat like cymbals crashing together in his chest, his stomach in some complicated Boy Scout knot. And the sound would grow louder and louder.

What? he finally begged it silently. Please! Just say it already! Just tell me, already! he’d plead. But the sound just got louder, like a subway train screeching along the rails, turning your whole body into goosebumps, giving you cold sweat in your armpits. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t just noise. It was voices: grinding, jangling, harsh and rude, all yelling at him at once. He tried to hide, sitting in the dark closet where his father’s clothes still hung. He draped the big red flannel shirt over his head, pressing the cuffs into his ears. That helped a little, but not much. Sometimes he’d fall asleep for an hour or two and wake up not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there. Somehow, he’d manage to get dressed, to eat, to talk reasonably to his mother. But more and more often, the voices interrupted him in the middle of dictating letters, and simple requests. And then he’d hear bad words, curse words. Words that implied terrible, obscene, demeaning things.

And sometimes it was clear to him that he was their target, while at others, he’d realize that the words were his words and they were meant for someone else. But who?

Someone close to him. He knew that. And it made him want to go down on his knees and ask forgiveness for the terrible words. Sometimes he’d pretend he needed to pick something up and sort of get down on one knee, doing it swiftly so his mother wouldn’t catch on. The voices stopped for a moment then, when he got down on his knees, he realized. So it was worth the effort.

Actually, he thought he was being quite reasonable about the whole thing, handling it well, he thought. If they responded to his being on his knees, well then, that was all right with him. It was no big deal. A sort of compromise. A way to get on with his work.

And there was so much work! The meeting! The big chance! Only a week away, he thought. Only four days away. Only two. Only…

The night before he looked at the letter again, then got up and walked into the bedroom and tried on his new suit. He stood by the only full-length mirror in the house, his hands in his pockets, turning admiringly to the right and then slowly to the left. He extended his hand, smiling professionally.

All was going as planned. Never had an entrepreneur overcome so many obstacles in his path! No capital. Dubious associates and employees (he thought of his mother and sister and brother) and impossible corporate headquarters.

Daddy would have been so proud of how he was pulling this off ! He was a chip off the old… No. That couldn’t be true. He wasn’t like his father. Not that he didn’t want to be!

He didn’t want to be.

He touched his head. The voices. They were back again. Contradicting him. And the ugly, obscene words! Louder now! But now, it wasn’t just words anymore. It was sentences. And it wasn’t just about him. It was about his father!

“My father would have been rich, successful!” he shouted out loud, his hands over his ears to keep out the words. But he couldn’t hold them tightly enough.

“Your father was a jerk, a patsy. He was a classic mark.” He pushed harder on the sides of his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you fuck!” Then, suddenly he felt calmer. He looked at the mirror, and his reflection showed him a serious young man, slim and intelligent. He looked at it a while, pleased, when suddenly, without warning, it began to change.

First, the face turned very young, almost into a child’s. He noticed the pimples on his forehead—and the hair! He touched the mirror, furious. The serious young man had disappeared and all that was left was a gangly kid with greasy hair and acne in a glorified Bar Mitzvah suit. And that was the person that Howard Archer, CEO, Pacific Freezer Corporation, who had come all the way from California, would be meeting.

No!!

He walked to the mirror, tapping it harshly with his knuckle, trying to jog it into changing, the way you adjusted the fuzzy picture on the television set. He touched the cool glass. The voices grew louder, a thousand subway cars screeching in the darkness. He felt his fist smash into the glass and felt the cold, sharp slivers, which then grew hot and thick and very red. So red. The blood spurted out wildly, like a fountain, he thought, fascinated, watching it soak his new pants and make the floor slippery.

He heard the far-off screams and saw his mother’s horrified face, his sister’s and brother’s terrified stares. The voices in his head grew silent. He was so relieved, that he actually smiled as he closed his eyes, welcoming the quiet darkness.

Chapter twenty-three

The house was quiet. The boxes of stationery gone. The typewriter back in its case at the bottom of the closet. And her mother didn’t talk anymore about the postage money, and the stationary money. And no one bullied her or teased her, Sara thought. But her mother’s face! It was awful to look at—the pinched worry lines constant now, even deeper than before. And her long silences worse than her screaming. Worst of all, was her sitting in that old chair, just staring at the walls. It brought back the old fears: again, monsters rustled in the closets, even though Sara knew she was far too old for that, eleven next birthday. But she had no control over it. She was afraid, all the time. Terrified. The disastrous tide that had borne away her father had now taken her brother too. Who was next? she wondered, filled with guilt.

She should have saved them. The fact that Jesse was still alive was of little comfort. She couldn’t bear to visit him in that place where they’d taken him. She imagined deformed, dangerous people wandering the halls, or chained to filthy beds, even though her mother took Louis and visited there often. And when she came back, she talked cheerfully about the wide lawns, the nice nurses.

She was afraid, but there was anger too. Why did he have to behave that way? Why did he have to create yet another shameful secret by being in such a place! She was already hiding so much. For him to burden her with more… It was unforgivable!

Her whole life was painfully split in two: the abnormal child—disgraced in so many ways—that was the real her, constantly competed with the normal, young girl with the good grades that she pretended to be. And she was constantly afraid of slipping up, of letting the truth escape like some dangerous criminal, sure it would attack and destroy everything she’d tried so hard to achieve. She constantly walked the high wire, high above the crowds, without a net. One unsure step, one tilt of the balancing rod from absolute center would send her hurtling down to crushed oblivion.

Her teachers’ praises were like a cleansing shower that made her feel good for the moment, even though the feeling never lasted. The next day, the next hour, she would feel her great inferiority again, needing to prove her worth all over again from scratch.

She had grown accustomed slowly to the Day School. She’d taken the hand extended by several teachers and pulled herself up to grade level and then beyond. She finally mastered Hebrew, going beyond the ‘bas aw baw’ to where she could actually understand the words of the Chumash and Navi—the Five Books of Moses and the Prophets—in the original. And even though she mostly wound up translating the words into English, sometimes the Hebrew phrases caught her by surprise and she realized there were some words the two languages didn’t share. The Hebrew word tameh for example, which was translated into English as “unclean.” It didn’t mean that at all, she learned. It was an impurity of spirit that had no connection to dirt of the physical kind. She understood she had to think in Hebrew. It opened up a whole new world, which she entered hesitantly.

While certain things in the Bible interested her—the apple of knowledge juicy with forbidden promise, the seas standing up in a wall of sparkling water to let the Hebrews pass—she had not yet grasped the point of it all. It seemed interesting but ultimately quite as useless as those fairy tales she loved in the Red Fairy book and the Russian Fairy book that lined the shelves of the local library.

What was the point of studying such things, she wondered. How would it ever be useful in any way to those practical things she knew composed her real life?

When Rabbi Pinchas walked into the classroom for the first time, the girls began to giggle. He wore a baggy black suit that dropped limply from his shoulders, as if on a hanger. A wispy, small beard curled half-heartedly around his lips with an air of extreme, unrewarded effort. His teeth protruded and his large glasses slipped down his big nose. He wore a plain black skullcap so low down on his forehead it almost touched his brows.

As he faced the laughter, his face colored a silly pink. “Ve are now gong to lun d’Chumash.”

Sara gasped. She suddenly felt she understood why people hated Jews. Funny and different. Ridiculous really. You could even understand why those Germans… She stopped, appalled at her train of thought. Yet it made sense. You couldn’t admit it, but she understood all those crowds who rounded up Jews, who baited them and wanted to kill them. She stared at him, not hearing a word he said, hating him, hating herself, ashamed. She looked down at her notebook, doodling circles within circles, each one growing darker and more impenetrable.

Ve gar lo toneh v’lo t’lhatzenu

Ki garim hoyitem b’Eretz Mitzraim

Im aneh taaneh oto,

Im tza-ok titz-ak ah ly, shamo-ah eshmah ta-ahko

V’charah api v’haragti eschem bcherev

V’hyo neshchem almanos a benachem yitomim…

Rabbi Pinchas read from the Chumash. Even the Hebrew he muddied with his mushy, old world pronunciation! There was more dignity, she thought, in the crisp vowels and consonants of her Israeli teachers, whose Hebrew began in 1948. His went back hundreds of years. It smelled of old streets and wood-burning stoves in run-down houses where little children gathered on dark winter days in between pogroms to learn the holy words. It had nothing to do with her, an American girl. Yet the words piqued her interest. Yitom—an orphan, almanah—a widow.

“You must not bodder a strain-jer or hoight him,” Rabbi Pinchas explained in tortured English. “Thoighty-six times de Toirah tells us dis. Not any odder mitzveh. Not to luv God. Not to keep d’Shabbas. Not to eat koisher doz’e tell us so meny times. Vut duz it mean ‘bodder and hoight?’ De Talmud tells us dat ‘Toneh’ is not to hoight him vit voids and ‘lo telchitzeneh’ dunt cheat ’im in business. Dun’t say to him: Yestarday you prayed to iduls with d’pork still stuck to your teet, and you haf de chutzpah to argue vit me, a real Jew?”‘ He rubbed his hands and his body seemed to rise off the ground in indignation.

He picked up his Chumash and read, translating as he proceeded. She began to hear the words cleanly, her mind washing away his tortured rendition, leaving behind his words as distilled ideas.

“A stranger is someone who comes alone. You might think: I can do whatever I want to him and no one will know. Don’t think it! We were strangers in Egypt and they oppressed us but God heard our suffering and avenged us. For I am the Lord who sees the oppressions that are done under the sun and behold the tears of those that were oppressed and had no comforter. And it is I who deliver every man from the hand of him that is stronger than he. In the same way, do not afflict the orphan and the widow since I shall hearken to their cry! ”

The power!

She listened, entranced by the incredible beauty of the ideas that went straight through her like a sword of light, touching her soul.

Safe!

The power, beating down the waves! The power that kept you “Why the widow?” Rabbi Pinchas’ voice rang out powerfully from his frail body, “Because she is alone and has no one to speak for her. The orphan,” his voice became dear, noble to her now, moving her almost to tears, “because he has lost his hand in his father. He has no longer anybody to depend on, to lean on. The Torah tells us:

‘Don’t use their weakness. Don’t make them feel it.’ Isaiah the prophet told the people: ‘Woe if the widow and orphan have to cry to me! I will hear them. Be just, or I will mete out justice. Your wives will be widowed, your children, orphans.’”

She felt her aching heart lift out of the darkness, experiencing a comfort so deep and real it seemed as if a healing hand had reached inside her to bandage raw wounds. She sensed, almost palpably, the power emanating from Rabbi Pinchas’s frail, almost ridiculous body. It was the power of goodness.

Astonishment and deep shame washed over her, followed by a certain horror. She had seen him with their eyes, the eyes of the ignorant hordes that for centuries have seen only the pale faces, the odd black clothes, blind to the spirit inside, the intelligence, the storehouse of ancient goodness. And therefore they had killed the body, destroying the repository of that unique spirit, allowing it to leave the world. How many people like Rabbi Pinchas, filled with words of kindness, had they destroyed? How would they ever be replaced?

She waited for him after class, embarrassed. He too felt uncomfortable. She was a young girl, he a young Talmud scholar, inexperienced in teaching girls. It was a bit shameful to him. Yet she wanted to know more. She pursued him until he agreed to teach her and a few others after school, an hour a week. And what she discovered at these classes, was that she had a soul. It had a name: neshamah. There, inside her, was a living, animating presence, real, yet invisible. Not flesh, yet with definite needs of its own. You had to feed it, because if not, it hungered.